The invention relates to wings for aircraft and more particularly to wings with wing shells made of composite fibre materials, especially carbon fibre reinforced plastics.
The trend in modern aircraft construction is to make increasing use of shell components made of carbon fibre reinforced plastics. Such components generally comprise the wing skin and stringers joined to it. Longitudinal forces are generally transmitted by both the skin and the stringers. In the case of highly stressed wing shells very large wall thicknesses have to be used for the wing skin and stringers owing to the strong forces. Adhesion of thick-walled components creates problems concerning the damage tolerance of the shell and particularly partial detachment of individual stringers from the wing skin due to impact loads, and subsequent tear propagation at a detached location. Such skin-stringer connections are generally secured by rivets in addition to adhesion.
A further problem is the introduction of longitudinal forces into the wing shell. Connection methods borrowed largely from metal construction are used here, even for wing components made of composite fibre materials. But well-tried connection methods in metal construction are often not suitable for the fibres in structures made of composite fibre materials, i.e. they are not adapted to the special properties of composite fibre materials, so must necessarily lead to compromises in the formation of the structure. In addition they are generally labour-intensive.